“We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our
admissions books,” said William D. Henderson, a professor of law at
Indiana University, who has written extensively on the issue. “Thirty
years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward
mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school
escalator is broken.”

But you may not have yet seen a similar story running in The Atlantic called Law School Applications Are Collapsing (As They Should Be).It's chock full of charts. graphs and data supporting the point that law schools are no longer immune from the forces that have brought down the rest of the economy since the great recession began and now the chickens have come home to roost. Check it out.

During the decade before the economic crisis, spending on legal services
in America grew twice as fast as inflation. The best lawyers made
skyscrapers-full of money, tempting ever more students to pile into law
schools. But most law graduates never get a big-firm job. Many of them
instead become the kind of nuisance-lawsuit filer that makes the tort
system a costly nightmare. According to a study in 2006, America has
more lawyers per person of its population than any of 29 countries
studied (except Greece), and it spends two to three times as much on its
tort system, as a percentage of GDP, as other big economies (except
Italy, where things are nearly as bad).

There are many reasons for this. One is the extortionate costs of a
legal education. There is just one path for a lawyer in most American
states: a four-year undergraduate degree in some unrelated subject, then
a three-year law degree at one of 200 law schools accredited by the
American Bar Association and an expensive preparation for the bar exam.
This leaves today’s average law-school graduate with $100,000 of debt on
top of undergraduate debts. Law-school debt means that many cannot
afford to go into government or non-profit work, and that they have to
work fearsomely hard.